Acetophenone and α-methylbenzyl alcohol are essential organic chemical materials. Acetophenone, which can be used as solvent, spice, plasticizer and chemical intermediate, is widely used in the field of soap, spice, medicine, etc. α-Methylbenzyl alcohol, which is also named as α-benzene ethanol or styracitol, can be used for mixing the chemical essence or as the raw material of the preparation of α-Methylbenzyl acetate and 1-phenylethyl propionate. There are large amounts of acetophenone and α-methylbenzyl alcohol in some raw materials, byproducts and wastes many petrochemical enterprises. The total content is more than 90% in all. However, some manufacturers don't dispose the mixed materials but sell them as low-value-added products directly. Therefore, the recycling of acetophenone, α-methylbenzyl alcohol products has significant economic and environmental benefits.
At present, the separation of acetophenone and α-methylbenzyl alcohol is generally resolved by rectification process. To achieve the optimization of the mass transfer process in distillation column, the distillation separation process is deeply investigated, such as the developing new packing. Yet because of the quite similar physical properties of acetophenone and α-methylbenzyl alcohol, for example, the diffidence of their melting and boiling points is only 1.6° C. under ordinary pressure. Therefore, acetophenone and α-methylbenzyl can be barely separated by ordinary distillation separation or crystallization methods, etc. It needs to increase the number of plates or to use the special rectification method to achieve a fine separation between them.
As the one of the most important host compounds in the supramolecular chemistry, cyclodextrin (CDs) and its derivatives are widely used in separation technology such as molecular imprinting, high performance liquid chromatography, capillary electrophoresis and membrane separation. In recent years, some studies on the host cyclodextrin about selective separation of organic compounds which have similar structures and melting or boiling points by the molecular recognition have been reported. Patent (CN 101891609A) discloses a method of selective separation of 4-bibenzoic acid and 3-bibenzoic acid with CDs as host molecules.